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09/09/2013

Why is Foust Distracting Us with Stories of Snowden's Zillions of Docs?

Somewhere, there's some NSA bugs on this table...G20 meeting in London in 2009. Photo by Downing Street.

For some people, Joshua Foust is some kind of clever authority, and they lap up his stuff on the NSA hacking scandal and defector Edward Snowden with particular eagerness because few if any journalists are tackling the story critically.

But as readers of my blogs know, I'm a long-time critic of Foust, who I have found to be duplicitious and manipulative on many occasions for reasons that are sometimes elusive and sometimes have to do with his posture as an International Relations Realist, a certain self-reinforcing school of thought in Washington particular infecting the think-tank and consultant world.

On the Snowden story, sometimes I see he is simply distracting from the likelihood that from available evidence, this is a planned caper not only of WikiLeaks, but the Kremlin. That is -- sure, he's pointing up the Russian angle, but making it seem as if it all started recently. Or he keeps saying that Snowden is a naif, a bumbler, who stumbled into the cunning former KGB officer's arms through "poor trip planning," as Evgeny Morozov phrased it in a cynical article for Der Spiegel. And that makes it seem like not Snowden, but somebody else is really to blame -- and minimizes his role.

That is, he's happy to find the Kremlin's long arm behind this caper, but then he is silent about Jacob Appelbaum, the key technical "wheels" to this caper, a creature of the German Chaos Communications Club who is now holed up in Germany, afraid to come home and face the WikiLeaks grand jury which has been the reason for his questioning at borders before and the seizure of his Twitter account by federal authorities.

Sometimes Foust seems merely to be trying to convert himself from a defense consultant -- in an area - Central Asia and Afghanistan -- which no one needs anymore now that troops are pulling out of Afghanistan -- to some other field or theme where there might be work. Can't fault him for that.

Sometimes it seems like it's the HBGary plan, stillborn after the hack, has come to life. Remember how poor HPGary, the consulting firm that was hacked by Anonymous/LulzSec because it developed a plan not only to fight Anonymous, but "go after" Glenn Greenwald, was itself hacked? Remember how scandalous everyone thought it was that any firm that the FBI might hire would even THINK of taking down GG? Of course, it was a proposal that was floated to win a contract, and actually, nothing unlawful seemed to be involved. We could have a separate discussion about whether the government should "go after" dissidents -- certainly there needs to be restrictions on that! -- but at what point does an elected liberal government get to engage in not only counter-intelligence, but counter-spin to tendentious lies?

Obviously, that's better coming from the private sector for all kinds of reasons, so now, for free, or who knows, maybe for some modest blogging fee, Foust is taking down Greenwald in ways that HBGary could have only dreamed of.

In any event, this last weeks's offerings, recently in How Many Documents Did Edward Snowden Take and then earlier Least Credible Accusation and then later Proliferation of Edward Snowden, is designed to dazzle us with the Big Data of all those docs, and distract us from something else: the very precise stories that are very deadly whacks at the NSA and our national security.

See, I'm going to play Team B here and simply assume that everything that Foust comes up with is wrong and a distraction and like the product of a mole. You can take it or leave it if you'd rather be on Team B.

So to play the theory out here, let me explain:

o If you invoke the "20,000" or "58,000" or more documents, it just sounds like so many as not to be "serious" -- there's that naif again, who "doesn't know what he's got". That disguises the fact that he's all too cunning and it may be much more planned.

o If you invoke all those zillions of docs, it makes it seem like Snowden's hack was random or opportunistic -- he was in Sector A today, so he dumped Sector B; tomorrow he happened to be in Sector Q so he dumped that, unwittingly, quickly, unable to see what he had for fear of being caught. The randomness and pointlessness of it then sounds like the sullen Chelsea Manning, unhappy at her job and situation and resentful of the government and vaguely upset about various "civic" issues, so she decides to just dump 200,000 docs *because she can*. You know, hacker nihilism. But that makes it seem like less of a crime. Vandalism more than espionage...

o If you invoke precise but very different numbers -- especially different versions of the story -- it's 9,000 -- no, it's 50,000 -- no, it's 58,000 -- you open up the story to reasonable doubts that none of it is true, or that there is some other unknown number that no one really has -- it's unknowable.

o But most importantly, if you invoke all these documents, you distract from the fact that the team "G9" may have worked together long before May 2013 with a wish list in order to harm the NSA the most -- both because the war on the NSA that hackers have announced even more than a year ago, and as part of the Assange-led operation to whack hard at the NSA -- which was begun long before Snowden and which is prefigured in his Democracy Now! interview about Binney.

Foust says that the differing numbers help us realize that maybe they are lying -- but what he finds more interesting is the notion that Snowden and his co-conspirators cannot possibly have read everything -- it is not physically or humanly possible. So then he concludes that therefore, he cannot control damage (much as Manning couldn't when she leaked zillions of reports of battles that contained sensitive information and names that could harm sources of the US military and US soldiers themselves):

So when we combine all of this — the constantly upward-revised number
of documents Snowden stole, combined with his clearly dishonest claim
that he carefully read all of them — a troubling picture emerges. Edward
Snowden could not have read all of these documents, nor could he
possibly have the understanding to contextualize and explain them to
anyone else. Moreover, the journalists who have helped him push this lie
into the public have, themselves, lied about both the content of these
documents (namely, the damage that would result from unredacted
disclosure) and their extent.

This leaves me with the same question that’s been bugging me since
this whole scandal picked up speed. If the source, and the journalists
closest to him, are lying — constantly — why on earth should we trust
them to report on their documents honestly? At this point, I have no
faith that they will do so — and I think it is safe to assume that if
they find evidence that the law is followed, or a document exonerating
the President, they will refuse to publish it because it would weaken
their argument.

So all of this sounds important and sincere and it's why the IC crowd licks it up.

But here's the thing. It distracts. It distracts from the other much more likely scenario, in my view: that Assange, Appelbaum, Poitras and Greenwald had a wishlist of the kinds of documents they needed to make the best case they could, they tasked Snowden to find the documents, and he willingly cooperated, and they produced them.

Like this: "We need to influence the German elections". "We need to get business afraid." "We need to get the geeks who do the crypto standards really freaked." "We need to convince ordinary Americans that the feds are in their cat pics." etc. So go get docs A, B, C that do those things.

When Manning talked to Lamo in his famous chat whose logs were published in Wired, he had a grab-bag of soup to nuts. He had the Vatican doing something bad one day -- he looked it up because he hated the Pope for supposedly encroaching on his sexuality, as so many online types do, so he went looking for a cover-up of a child abuse scandal. Or he had something in Iceland another day because he had to show "proof of life" to Assange that he knew that they were watching him, to prove he really had what he said he had; or he had some other random thing some other day, not linked by any larger scheme, but more to do with this or that personal agenda or beef. Then Assange, the older, more cunning and wiser mind, puts him up to this or that thing to hack as it suits his larger agenda.

It's my view that Assange already knew that he could make a huge propagandistic splash with the "Collateral Murder" video and he got Manning to get it - and Manning may have seen it by then and may have readily agreed, then read further on in via the Internet (that's what it sounds like to me from his trial testimony although he never quite confesses that -- the prosecution says they found proof of his contact with Assange.)

But other than that, the 200,000 cables weren't particularly linked with sense; their leakage had a haphazard effect to them. For example, when Hillary went to Kazakhstan, then they might find something from Central Asia to embarrass her, but neglect to publish the Uzbekistan cables to embarass her on the next stop of her trip -- they just weren't really caring. Or when Holbrooke died, they might pull up something about him but totally accidently, as something related to something else about Pollack. Or when they wanted to stick it to MasterCard which wouldn't take their payments, they would dig around until they found the "scandal" of the US Embassy in Moscow helping MasterCard try to win some contract with the Russians (not a scandal, as all embassies are tasked to help US business abroad as part of their lawful mission, and those not hostile to capitalism don't have a problem with this.)

By contrast, the Snowden "oevre" is much, much more methodical in its selection, meaning and impact. Snowden isn't hurting the NSA and our country because he's random (as Foust implies) but because he and his comrades know exactly how to best inflict the wounds -- and when.

This kind of attack waged symbolic figure-by-symbolic figure is summed up in the famous saying against the Nazis "First they came for the communists, etc" but it's also in fact the way the communists themselves killed civil society in any country they infiltrated -- kill priests, trade union leaders, scientists, writers, picking out various figures, then hollow out the groups or institutions or bodies they ran and simulate them only with the communist ideology.

So in similar fashion, this attack on our country starts with the Verizon telephone info +leak from the business accounts, because that would scare business -- business, when affected, moves markets, shapes public opinion, because that's where the money is. Everybody holds a cell phone in their hand; many people have Verizon as their carrier. Instant impact.

The first leak also presented the very misleading PRISM slides that made it seem falsely as if the government could snoop in everybody's Facebook at will. Everybody's on Facebook.

Then next leak attacked the big tech companies like Apple or Google and made it seem as if they were in bed with the government -- to tap in the free-floating animosity that is out there against these big companies that dominate our lives, and also make them see that a slogan like "Don't Be Evil" from Google was fake and a lie.

The list of cyberattack sites was supposed to add to the sense that the US was the most evil country in the world waging war on other countries first -- and of course came just in time for the flight to Hong Kong to be useful to the Chinese.

The "Boundless Informant" leak about global surveillance that impacted Americans if they were connected to foreigners was supposed to undermine the government's key argument about all this - that yes, it monitored foreigners because it had to in a dangerous world, but it didn't spy on our own people. This leak, like others, wasn't about substance but about reputational sabotage and undermining. It's like the Saul Alinsky method (which originates in the Lenin method) of freezing a target and calling attention to ways that it is "unlike itself" or "not true to its ideals" and the opposite of what it seems like, to discredit it and make it seem as if things that are far worse (China, Russia) are good by contrast.

Then came the leak of Snowden himself, so that he could differentiate himself from the legions of Anonymous and LulzSec who always lack credibility because they don't name their names and Americans tend to then find them duplicitious and not leading up to their ideals of "transparency" if they can't do it for themselves -- as with WikiLeaks. So Snowden took care of that credibility problem in a second, even as -- in my view -- he and Jacob Appelbaum likely had some other anonymous or Anonymous help in this caper.

Then comes of course more leaks on how the US spies on China -- to make the package attractive to China -- and then spying on the G20 in 2009 -- just as Russia is gearing up for the G20 (that just passed) and with all its sins against dissidents, LGBT, and migrants, has to appear "holier than thou". Perfect timing.

The Skype leak was meant particularly for legions of people in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union who use Skype, which originated in an Estonian company who use Skype for their personal phone calls because they can't afford expensive smart phones. It's a particular favourite for large diasporas and labor migrant populations. Sure, we all use Skype, but some people use Skype all day long and are particularly wedded to it in some places -- and if that massive group of people could now worry that someone was spying on their chats with babushka, that could undermine faith in America, blame America first, and gather support for Snowden, who might otherwise be seen as a strange defector going in the wrong direction.

Someone should really vet the Al Jazeera descriptions to see if they are accurate, but assuming they are more or less descriptions, you can go on and on. Each leak has a really specific reputational sabotage goal. The leaks never show any specific case of anyone actually spied on wrongfully or illegally or any concrete data even about blanket statements made, i.e. "The NSA spied on the G20" or "the NSA spied on the EU" and therefore "X was learned about Y and Z action was taken."

GERMAN AND OTHER ELECTIONS

Laura Poitras piece in Der Spiegel about the spying on the EU, as well as the spying on Germany specifically, was meant to influence the German elections. It was meant to distract from the fact that Merkel was challenging Russia over legitimate issues from human rights to Gazprom and distract to make the US the problem for Germany, not Russia. The German left from the Pirate Party to the Greens to the SDP naturally don't like the Americans and are indifferent or even friendly to Russia and all these leaks served that agenda. "NSA Keeps Tabs on Ordinary Germans," screams the headlines and these parties put people out into the streets protesting instantly by the tens of thousands. This is like the 1980s when they would scream about American missiles planned for deployment and never Russian missiles already pointed right at them.

Then over to Australia for a leak also tied to elections there, and Snowden's dramatic Sheremeytevo sojourn. Then more on individual emails supposedly being vacuumed up -- then the big black budget leaked just in time for Congressional debates about the deficit. There's much more -- it would take a very lengthy post to analyze it all - but skip to the news that gasp, the US spies on Brazil -- just when Glenn needs a boost after not publishing for awhile, and when his husband, David Miranda has been caught at the airport as a mule with sticks given him by Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras in Germany to ferry to Glenn via London.

DO THEY IMPROVISE OR IS THERE A PLAN?

Now, at which point are these people improvising and playing catch-up - as they might have been with the Brazil leaks or others -- although the Brazilian leader is due for a big banquet in Washington soon that may get cancelled -- and which are they strategically following a road map of world events and groups of people or countries they need to target?

A recent leak targeted the crypto community itself, opening up the idea that even the standards and algorithms themselves upon which all the edifices of things like SSL and https are built could be on shaky, manipulated ground. That was to undermine everything about the NSA completely as an entreprise, all those who worked for it, and even all those who talked to the NSA in various standards committees or conferences in the corporate world. Very thorough, this Bolshevik-like undermining and hollowing out of civil society,the professions, the trust in government.

But had they started with that, they would have lost their audience. Only nerds care about things like secure sockets and algorithms. Only professors and think tankers care about things like the G20 or the EU. If you want to get Americans' attentions, you have to go first to their businesses, their phones in their hands, their Facebooks and imply that the feds are in there.

So...How could people just grabbing a huge trove of docs be certain they could affect the German or Australian elections, or the G20 meetings, or Congressional budget debates or your fear for your cat pictures' lives? Either they have to be extremely nimble on their feet, or they had a plan and searched for the materials that would fit that plan first. I think it's the latter.

DID SNOWDEN PLAN ALL THIS?

It's hard to believe that Snowden himself, a 30-year-old narcissist whose interests ran to anime and computer forums and his pole-dancing girlfriend was really a huge student of world affairs. To be sure, he was stationed at the UN in Geneva and maybe absorbed some of it in his job, but he didn't seem to speak in the Ars Technica forum discussions with any huge geopolitical depth -- he was mainly interested in chatting about his theories of international finance and currencies and stocks, like all gold bug sorts are on forums. When he puts on his deep voice to impress the women and tells us that China isn't really an enemy because we have trade to link us, he just sounds ignorant even about the massive Chinese hacking right in his own field, which his own clients and government bosses must have been preoccupied with -- he never mentions it.

So that's where Assange, Greenwald, and others (don't forget Ewan McCaskill who is the most silent of all these partners) come in to tell him what to hack.

Now, I'm well aware that these people are incredibly savvy about 1st amendment precedents and the Pentagon Papers and British libel and terrorist laws (perhaps not so savvy about the latter given the Miranda episode) and they may be fully cognizant of how close to the line of commissioning hacks they can come to without looking like actual co-conspirators in espionage. I think that's why none of them will tell us a straight story on their dates of contact with Snowden or the processes for moving the docs.

But I think any or all of them are capable of, er, shaping what young Ed got up to. I'm willing to bet real money that Snowden, who didn't seem to go to any international conferences, hacker or otherwise, wasn't the one who thought up the idea of undermining the geek community's belief in standards -- that had to have been Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum, world conference goer.

WHAT SCRIPTS DID THEY USE TO MOVE AND ENCRYPT THOSE FILES?

And how did they torrent those files? What was the script they used to torrent those many docs?Hey, was it the same one Aaron Swartz used? Was it the one Bradley Manning was given or taught about by MIT hackers (Danny Clark and others)? Appelbaum was in Boston and knew these same hackers. Swartz FOIA'd himself to see what the feds might know about his massive torrenting activities and that's where I came up with the theory that he was related to either the Manning case or the WikiLeaks grand jury.

SECRET SHARERS?

Several people working night and day might still have a hard time coming up with this timetable of strategically leaked documents, however. For example, let's just take the innocent activities of human rights activists who want to raise cases during international events -- something I've done many times myself. Endless phone calls, memos, emails, travel plans, picketing permissions, visas can go into trying to become involved in something like an EU or G20 meeting -- writing up talking points or bullet points or manifestos takes time.

So they went full tilt on all this and maybe they did it all themselves but...I think they had help.

And maybe help they themselves didn't know they had.

STOPPING THAT SUBSCRIPTION TO THE DAILY WORKER

I'm drawn repeately to the fact that Snowden stops talking on line by 2009 or so. He may come back for one or two remarks to Ars Technica, but all his activity stops around them -- he's just not visible. Nowhere. His anime site -- nowhere. It's like the proverbial case of the guy who stops his subscription to the Daily Worker, so he won't look like he's a communist connected to the CP before he actually goes to work as a spy for the Soviets. Like that.

Example of a scenario: Snowden is recruited in Geneva or Tokyo years ago by Russian intelligence or their allies and they set this hack up. Gradually, he gets the wish list from them and gets it. But obviously, they need believable conduits. So they approach Greenwald and co. who know nothing of the previous recruitment or the wish-listing at all. Plausible deniability. Cut-outs.

Or there is someone else in this "chain of custody" who is working with Russian intelligence who makes suggestions about what is needed to "make the case" -- and that's when Snowden goes to Booz Hamilton to hack even more, and every specifically -- not just randomly downloading 50,000 units at all.

See, that's where Foust's story really breaks apart -- we all know Snowden went to work deliberately at Booz -- a person just randomly hacking and downloading megabytes would not do that.

MORE THAN HUMAN

As for this "not humanly possible stuff" -- well, this is More Than Human. There are all kinds of computer (duh) programs that can scan files and pick out key words and phrases and organize them for you. Even just going and clicking the start button on your PC and getting the file search can do some of that in a pinch. So they plug in the terms like "EU" or "encryption standards" or "email" and get what they get as needed. No need to read zillions of boring docs, some of which may have been fetched merely because they were technical systems manuals, or lists of names and phone numbers.

In just a few grabs over a few months, Aaron Swartz had something like 1.7 million files from JSTOR which he did search -- in fact, the alibi floated for him was that he was merely getting Big Data to research his theories about corporate funding and its affect on academia and published articles. So 50,000 docs is childs' play. People keep emails by the tens of thousands -- and yet search them instantly and effectively. So that's that.

Far from being guilty merely of trying to harm us because they don't know what they have, like children playing with matches, I think we are dealing with a sophisticated enemy that knows precisely how to harm us and our allies and is working with a roadmap. What's next?

Comments

Why is Foust Distracting Us with Stories of Snowden's Zillions of Docs?

Somewhere, there's some NSA bugs on this table...G20 meeting in London in 2009. Photo by Downing Street.

For some people, Joshua Foust is some kind of clever authority, and they lap up his stuff on the NSA hacking scandal and defector Edward Snowden with particular eagerness because few if any journalists are tackling the story critically.

But as readers of my blogs know, I'm a long-time critic of Foust, who I have found to be duplicitious and manipulative on many occasions for reasons that are sometimes elusive and sometimes have to do with his posture as an International Relations Realist, a certain self-reinforcing school of thought in Washington particular infecting the think-tank and consultant world.

On the Snowden story, sometimes I see he is simply distracting from the likelihood that from available evidence, this is a planned caper not only of WikiLeaks, but the Kremlin. That is -- sure, he's pointing up the Russian angle, but making it seem as if it all started recently. Or he keeps saying that Snowden is a naif, a bumbler, who stumbled into the cunning former KGB officer's arms through "poor trip planning," as Evgeny Morozov phrased it in a cynical article for Der Spiegel. And that makes it seem like not Snowden, but somebody else is really to blame -- and minimizes his role.

That is, he's happy to find the Kremlin's long arm behind this caper, but then he is silent about Jacob Appelbaum, the key technical "wheels" to this caper, a creature of the German Chaos Communications Club who is now holed up in Germany, afraid to come home and face the WikiLeaks grand jury which has been the reason for his questioning at borders before and the seizure of his Twitter account by federal authorities.

Sometimes Foust seems merely to be trying to convert himself from a defense consultant -- in an area - Central Asia and Afghanistan -- which no one needs anymore now that troops are pulling out of Afghanistan -- to some other field or theme where there might be work. Can't fault him for that.

Sometimes it seems like it's the HBGary plan, stillborn after the hack, has come to life. Remember how poor HPGary, the consulting firm that was hacked by Anonymous/LulzSec because it developed a plan not only to fight Anonymous, but "go after" Glenn Greenwald, was itself hacked? Remember how scandalous everyone thought it was that any firm that the FBI might hire would even THINK of taking down GG? Of course, it was a proposal that was floated to win a contract, and actually, nothing unlawful seemed to be involved. We could have a separate discussion about whether the government should "go after" dissidents -- certainly there needs to be restrictions on that! -- but at what point does an elected liberal government get to engage in not only counter-intelligence, but counter-spin to tendentious lies?

Obviously, that's better coming from the private sector for all kinds of reasons, so now, for free, or who knows, maybe for some modest blogging fee, Foust is taking down Greenwald in ways that HBGary could have only dreamed of.

In any event, this last weeks's offerings, recently in How Many Documents Did Edward Snowden Take and then earlier Least Credible Accusation and then later Proliferation of Edward Snowden, is designed to dazzle us with the Big Data of all those docs, and distract us from something else: the very precise stories that are very deadly whacks at the NSA and our national security.

See, I'm going to play Team B here and simply assume that everything that Foust comes up with is wrong and a distraction and like the product of a mole. You can take it or leave it if you'd rather be on Team B.

So to play the theory out here, let me explain:

o If you invoke the "20,000" or "58,000" or more documents, it just sounds like so many as not to be "serious" -- there's that naif again, who "doesn't know what he's got". That disguises the fact that he's all too cunning and it may be much more planned.

o If you invoke all those zillions of docs, it makes it seem like Snowden's hack was random or opportunistic -- he was in Sector A today, so he dumped Sector B; tomorrow he happened to be in Sector Q so he dumped that, unwittingly, quickly, unable to see what he had for fear of being caught. The randomness and pointlessness of it then sounds like the sullen Chelsea Manning, unhappy at her job and situation and resentful of the government and vaguely upset about various "civic" issues, so she decides to just dump 200,000 docs *because she can*. You know, hacker nihilism. But that makes it seem like less of a crime. Vandalism more than espionage...

o If you invoke precise but very different numbers -- especially different versions of the story -- it's 9,000 -- no, it's 50,000 -- no, it's 58,000 -- you open up the story to reasonable doubts that none of it is true, or that there is some other unknown number that no one really has -- it's unknowable.

o But most importantly, if you invoke all these documents, you distract from the fact that the team "G9" may have worked together long before May 2013 with a wish list in order to harm the NSA the most -- both because the war on the NSA that hackers have announced even more than a year ago, and as part of the Assange-led operation to whack hard at the NSA -- which was begun long before Snowden and which is prefigured in his Democracy Now! interview about Binney.

Foust says that the differing numbers help us realize that maybe they are lying -- but what he finds more interesting is the notion that Snowden and his co-conspirators cannot possibly have read everything -- it is not physically or humanly possible. So then he concludes that therefore, he cannot control damage (much as Manning couldn't when she leaked zillions of reports of battles that contained sensitive information and names that could harm sources of the US military and US soldiers themselves):

So when we combine all of this — the constantly upward-revised number
of documents Snowden stole, combined with his clearly dishonest claim
that he carefully read all of them — a troubling picture emerges. Edward
Snowden could not have read all of these documents, nor could he
possibly have the understanding to contextualize and explain them to
anyone else. Moreover, the journalists who have helped him push this lie
into the public have, themselves, lied about both the content of these
documents (namely, the damage that would result from unredacted
disclosure) and their extent.

This leaves me with the same question that’s been bugging me since
this whole scandal picked up speed. If the source, and the journalists
closest to him, are lying — constantly — why on earth should we trust
them to report on their documents honestly? At this point, I have no
faith that they will do so — and I think it is safe to assume that if
they find evidence that the law is followed, or a document exonerating
the President, they will refuse to publish it because it would weaken
their argument.

So all of this sounds important and sincere and it's why the IC crowd licks it up.

But here's the thing. It distracts. It distracts from the other much more likely scenario, in my view: that Assange, Appelbaum, Poitras and Greenwald had a wishlist of the kinds of documents they needed to make the best case they could, they tasked Snowden to find the documents, and he willingly cooperated, and they produced them.

Like this: "We need to influence the German elections". "We need to get business afraid." "We need to get the geeks who do the crypto standards really freaked." "We need to convince ordinary Americans that the feds are in their cat pics." etc. So go get docs A, B, C that do those things.

When Manning talked to Lamo in his famous chat whose logs were published in Wired, he had a grab-bag of soup to nuts. He had the Vatican doing something bad one day -- he looked it up because he hated the Pope for supposedly encroaching on his sexuality, as so many online types do, so he went looking for a cover-up of a child abuse scandal. Or he had something in Iceland another day because he had to show "proof of life" to Assange that he knew that they were watching him, to prove he really had what he said he had; or he had some other random thing some other day, not linked by any larger scheme, but more to do with this or that personal agenda or beef. Then Assange, the older, more cunning and wiser mind, puts him up to this or that thing to hack as it suits his larger agenda.

It's my view that Assange already knew that he could make a huge propagandistic splash with the "Collateral Murder" video and he got Manning to get it - and Manning may have seen it by then and may have readily agreed, then read further on in via the Internet (that's what it sounds like to me from his trial testimony although he never quite confesses that -- the prosecution says they found proof of his contact with Assange.)

But other than that, the 200,000 cables weren't particularly linked with sense; their leakage had a haphazard effect to them. For example, when Hillary went to Kazakhstan, then they might find something from Central Asia to embarrass her, but neglect to publish the Uzbekistan cables to embarass her on the next stop of her trip -- they just weren't really caring. Or when Holbrooke died, they might pull up something about him but totally accidently, as something related to something else about Pollack. Or when they wanted to stick it to MasterCard which wouldn't take their payments, they would dig around until they found the "scandal" of the US Embassy in Moscow helping MasterCard try to win some contract with the Russians (not a scandal, as all embassies are tasked to help US business abroad as part of their lawful mission, and those not hostile to capitalism don't have a problem with this.)

By contrast, the Snowden "oevre" is much, much more methodical in its selection, meaning and impact. Snowden isn't hurting the NSA and our country because he's random (as Foust implies) but because he and his comrades know exactly how to best inflict the wounds -- and when.

This kind of attack waged symbolic figure-by-symbolic figure is summed up in the famous saying against the Nazis "First they came for the communists, etc" but it's also in fact the way the communists themselves killed civil society in any country they infiltrated -- kill priests, trade union leaders, scientists, writers, picking out various figures, then hollow out the groups or institutions or bodies they ran and simulate them only with the communist ideology.

So in similar fashion, this attack on our country starts with the Verizon telephone info +leak from the business accounts, because that would scare business -- business, when affected, moves markets, shapes public opinion, because that's where the money is. Everybody holds a cell phone in their hand; many people have Verizon as their carrier. Instant impact.

The first leak also presented the very misleading PRISM slides that made it seem falsely as if the government could snoop in everybody's Facebook at will. Everybody's on Facebook.

Then next leak attacked the big tech companies like Apple or Google and made it seem as if they were in bed with the government -- to tap in the free-floating animosity that is out there against these big companies that dominate our lives, and also make them see that a slogan like "Don't Be Evil" from Google was fake and a lie.

The list of cyberattack sites was supposed to add to the sense that the US was the most evil country in the world waging war on other countries first -- and of course came just in time for the flight to Hong Kong to be useful to the Chinese.

The "Boundless Informant" leak about global surveillance that impacted Americans if they were connected to foreigners was supposed to undermine the government's key argument about all this - that yes, it monitored foreigners because it had to in a dangerous world, but it didn't spy on our own people. This leak, like others, wasn't about substance but about reputational sabotage and undermining. It's like the Saul Alinsky method (which originates in the Lenin method) of freezing a target and calling attention to ways that it is "unlike itself" or "not true to its ideals" and the opposite of what it seems like, to discredit it and make it seem as if things that are far worse (China, Russia) are good by contrast.

Then came the leak of Snowden himself, so that he could differentiate himself from the legions of Anonymous and LulzSec who always lack credibility because they don't name their names and Americans tend to then find them duplicitious and not leading up to their ideals of "transparency" if they can't do it for themselves -- as with WikiLeaks. So Snowden took care of that credibility problem in a second, even as -- in my view -- he and Jacob Appelbaum likely had some other anonymous or Anonymous help in this caper.

Then comes of course more leaks on how the US spies on China -- to make the package attractive to China -- and then spying on the G20 in 2009 -- just as Russia is gearing up for the G20 (that just passed) and with all its sins against dissidents, LGBT, and migrants, has to appear "holier than thou". Perfect timing.

The Skype leak was meant particularly for legions of people in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union who use Skype, which originated in an Estonian company who use Skype for their personal phone calls because they can't afford expensive smart phones. It's a particular favourite for large diasporas and labor migrant populations. Sure, we all use Skype, but some people use Skype all day long and are particularly wedded to it in some places -- and if that massive group of people could now worry that someone was spying on their chats with babushka, that could undermine faith in America, blame America first, and gather support for Snowden, who might otherwise be seen as a strange defector going in the wrong direction.

Someone should really vet the Al Jazeera descriptions to see if they are accurate, but assuming they are more or less descriptions, you can go on and on. Each leak has a really specific reputational sabotage goal. The leaks never show any specific case of anyone actually spied on wrongfully or illegally or any concrete data even about blanket statements made, i.e. "The NSA spied on the G20" or "the NSA spied on the EU" and therefore "X was learned about Y and Z action was taken."

GERMAN AND OTHER ELECTIONS

Laura Poitras piece in Der Spiegel about the spying on the EU, as well as the spying on Germany specifically, was meant to influence the German elections. It was meant to distract from the fact that Merkel was challenging Russia over legitimate issues from human rights to Gazprom and distract to make the US the problem for Germany, not Russia. The German left from the Pirate Party to the Greens to the SDP naturally don't like the Americans and are indifferent or even friendly to Russia and all these leaks served that agenda. "NSA Keeps Tabs on Ordinary Germans," screams the headlines and these parties put people out into the streets protesting instantly by the tens of thousands. This is like the 1980s when they would scream about American missiles planned for deployment and never Russian missiles already pointed right at them.

Then over to Australia for a leak also tied to elections there, and Snowden's dramatic Sheremeytevo sojourn. Then more on individual emails supposedly being vacuumed up -- then the big black budget leaked just in time for Congressional debates about the deficit. There's much more -- it would take a very lengthy post to analyze it all - but skip to the news that gasp, the US spies on Brazil -- just when Glenn needs a boost after not publishing for awhile, and when his husband, David Miranda has been caught at the airport as a mule with sticks given him by Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras in Germany to ferry to Glenn via London.

DO THEY IMPROVISE OR IS THERE A PLAN?

Now, at which point are these people improvising and playing catch-up - as they might have been with the Brazil leaks or others -- although the Brazilian leader is due for a big banquet in Washington soon that may get cancelled -- and which are they strategically following a road map of world events and groups of people or countries they need to target?

A recent leak targeted the crypto community itself, opening up the idea that even the standards and algorithms themselves upon which all the edifices of things like SSL and https are built could be on shaky, manipulated ground. That was to undermine everything about the NSA completely as an entreprise, all those who worked for it, and even all those who talked to the NSA in various standards committees or conferences in the corporate world. Very thorough, this Bolshevik-like undermining and hollowing out of civil society,the professions, the trust in government.

But had they started with that, they would have lost their audience. Only nerds care about things like secure sockets and algorithms. Only professors and think tankers care about things like the G20 or the EU. If you want to get Americans' attentions, you have to go first to their businesses, their phones in their hands, their Facebooks and imply that the feds are in there.

So...How could people just grabbing a huge trove of docs be certain they could affect the German or Australian elections, or the G20 meetings, or Congressional budget debates or your fear for your cat pictures' lives? Either they have to be extremely nimble on their feet, or they had a plan and searched for the materials that would fit that plan first. I think it's the latter.

DID SNOWDEN PLAN ALL THIS?

It's hard to believe that Snowden himself, a 30-year-old narcissist whose interests ran to anime and computer forums and his pole-dancing girlfriend was really a huge student of world affairs. To be sure, he was stationed at the UN in Geneva and maybe absorbed some of it in his job, but he didn't seem to speak in the Ars Technica forum discussions with any huge geopolitical depth -- he was mainly interested in chatting about his theories of international finance and currencies and stocks, like all gold bug sorts are on forums. When he puts on his deep voice to impress the women and tells us that China isn't really an enemy because we have trade to link us, he just sounds ignorant even about the massive Chinese hacking right in his own field, which his own clients and government bosses must have been preoccupied with -- he never mentions it.

So that's where Assange, Greenwald, and others (don't forget Ewan McCaskill who is the most silent of all these partners) come in to tell him what to hack.

Now, I'm well aware that these people are incredibly savvy about 1st amendment precedents and the Pentagon Papers and British libel and terrorist laws (perhaps not so savvy about the latter given the Miranda episode) and they may be fully cognizant of how close to the line of commissioning hacks they can come to without looking like actual co-conspirators in espionage. I think that's why none of them will tell us a straight story on their dates of contact with Snowden or the processes for moving the docs.

But I think any or all of them are capable of, er, shaping what young Ed got up to. I'm willing to bet real money that Snowden, who didn't seem to go to any international conferences, hacker or otherwise, wasn't the one who thought up the idea of undermining the geek community's belief in standards -- that had to have been Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum, world conference goer.

WHAT SCRIPTS DID THEY USE TO MOVE AND ENCRYPT THOSE FILES?

And how did they torrent those files? What was the script they used to torrent those many docs?Hey, was it the same one Aaron Swartz used? Was it the one Bradley Manning was given or taught about by MIT hackers (Danny Clark and others)? Appelbaum was in Boston and knew these same hackers. Swartz FOIA'd himself to see what the feds might know about his massive torrenting activities and that's where I came up with the theory that he was related to either the Manning case or the WikiLeaks grand jury.

SECRET SHARERS?

Several people working night and day might still have a hard time coming up with this timetable of strategically leaked documents, however. For example, let's just take the innocent activities of human rights activists who want to raise cases during international events -- something I've done many times myself. Endless phone calls, memos, emails, travel plans, picketing permissions, visas can go into trying to become involved in something like an EU or G20 meeting -- writing up talking points or bullet points or manifestos takes time.

So they went full tilt on all this and maybe they did it all themselves but...I think they had help.

And maybe help they themselves didn't know they had.

STOPPING THAT SUBSCRIPTION TO THE DAILY WORKER

I'm drawn repeately to the fact that Snowden stops talking on line by 2009 or so. He may come back for one or two remarks to Ars Technica, but all his activity stops around them -- he's just not visible. Nowhere. His anime site -- nowhere. It's like the proverbial case of the guy who stops his subscription to the Daily Worker, so he won't look like he's a communist connected to the CP before he actually goes to work as a spy for the Soviets. Like that.

Example of a scenario: Snowden is recruited in Geneva or Tokyo years ago by Russian intelligence or their allies and they set this hack up. Gradually, he gets the wish list from them and gets it. But obviously, they need believable conduits. So they approach Greenwald and co. who know nothing of the previous recruitment or the wish-listing at all. Plausible deniability. Cut-outs.

Or there is someone else in this "chain of custody" who is working with Russian intelligence who makes suggestions about what is needed to "make the case" -- and that's when Snowden goes to Booz Hamilton to hack even more, and every specifically -- not just randomly downloading 50,000 units at all.

See, that's where Foust's story really breaks apart -- we all know Snowden went to work deliberately at Booz -- a person just randomly hacking and downloading megabytes would not do that.

MORE THAN HUMAN

As for this "not humanly possible stuff" -- well, this is More Than Human. There are all kinds of computer (duh) programs that can scan files and pick out key words and phrases and organize them for you. Even just going and clicking the start button on your PC and getting the file search can do some of that in a pinch. So they plug in the terms like "EU" or "encryption standards" or "email" and get what they get as needed. No need to read zillions of boring docs, some of which may have been fetched merely because they were technical systems manuals, or lists of names and phone numbers.

In just a few grabs over a few months, Aaron Swartz had something like 1.7 million files from JSTOR which he did search -- in fact, the alibi floated for him was that he was merely getting Big Data to research his theories about corporate funding and its affect on academia and published articles. So 50,000 docs is childs' play. People keep emails by the tens of thousands -- and yet search them instantly and effectively. So that's that.

Far from being guilty merely of trying to harm us because they don't know what they have, like children playing with matches, I think we are dealing with a sophisticated enemy that knows precisely how to harm us and our allies and is working with a roadmap. What's next?